Find A Psychotherapist
Finding a psychotherapist can be a daunting task, because it is difficult to know what to look for as a consumer. There are many different specialties within clinical psychology, and many different theoretical orientations and types of treatments within any specialty. On top of this, you have the problem that it is difficult for people to even go out looking for a therapist many times, because the idea of mental illness has created so much stigma within modern culture that people feel ashamed.
People often resist the idea to find a therapist because they feel as though they should be able to control their own minds. In many ways this doesn’t make a lot of sense, since it is now widely understood that the psychology of an individual is controlled by their brain and by their body’s chemistry, so in many ways psychology is akin to endocrinology. However, there are still different implications to seeing a psychotherapist for help versus seeing a primary care physician for some medication.
The problem is that the medications we have today, while better than those which existed a few decades ago, are still not really that good for the most part. Long-term outcomes from medication management are not great. The upshot is that the long-term outcomes from psychotherapy are pretty good, and when medication and talk therapy are used together the results tend to be even better. So if you want to feel better, act better, and be better, your best bet is to find a psychologist, counselor, or other mental health professional and see them for a full course of treatment.
The thing to remember when you are doing talk therapy is that it is not “all in your head” what is happening; the experiences you have change your brain chemistry just as your brain chemistry changes your experience. So when you are in psychotherapy, you are actually creating a targeted chemical treatment out of your body’s own natural hormones and neurotransmitters.
This is much better than medications, which are created based on theoretical models of what is chemically happening within your brain. Oftentimes, even the creators of the drugs do not know how it is that they work, much less you doctor. So it is ideal to think that your doctor can tell you exactly what is chemically happening in your brain and prescribe the corrective dose of whatever, but the fact is that we do not have any good model of what the chemical profile of a brain should be.
We can tell about the very obcious things, such as the shortage of dopamine which brings about Parkinson’s disease, but when it comes to anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, addiction, or any of the other common psychiatric ailments, the idea that they are “caused” by a chemical imbalance is pure fantasy. It might still be correct, but nobody knows this to be the sequence of causation for certain, and anyone who tells you differently has misunderstood the research.
The bottom line here is that psychotherapy and counseling provide highly effective treatments for a wide variety of ailments, including physical ailments such as irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, and fibromyalgia. There is also plenty of research to show that psychotherapy can increase your quality of life no matter what your present condition or level of functioning. Whether you are a perfectly normal and healthy human with no major problems, or a perfectly normal healthy human who is going through a difficult time with a relationship or medical condition, or whether you come from a family history of mental illness and have always had psychological difficulties, counseling services are a valuable addition to your routine that can improve your quality of life, improve your relationships, and improve your mood.
This area of the LocalServ network is here to provide information about the types of therapists that you may encounter, different theories of practice and of change, different treatments and therapies for the various types psychological difficulties you can encounter, issues surrounding the idea of mental illness, and, of course, contact information for psychotherapists near you.